A History Maker (4 page)

“You were lucky it was me and not old Dodds who found you,” said Shafto affably, “He'd have pushed you into the sea. He says you got that draw by a trick — a filthy trick.”

“He's right. Attacking after pretending to surrender is warfare for weans. When Dad gave his orders we were too feart and excited to think.”

“You'll feel better when the medics have put more blood back into you,” said Shafto, “Your dad was a genius. He saw a loophole in the rules and made it work for him. People are tired of the old strategies — that battle will be disked by millions. In a month or three you and me should put our heads together and see if we
can work out other new strategies — within the Geneva Conventions of course, always within the Conventions. I want you for an ally one day.”

As Wat was carried to the aircraft he said harshly, “Am I the last? Are all the rest of Ettrick dead?”

“No no no!” said a nurse soothingly, “Fourteen are living and most of them can be mended. Your brother Joe will mend.”

“Good,” said Wat and wept, covering his face with his hands. The public eye floated above it saying, “Goodbye Wat Dryhope, a hero of our time — a brave, nervous, tricky hero obviously shaken to the core by what may be eventually voted The Battle of The Century, a surprising last-minute draw between Ettrick and the five clans of Northumbria United.”

T
HE RED CROSS put the dead soldiers into pure white vaults below their homes where useless things were made good again. Women who had most loved them washed the bodies, laying them neatly between their belongings and the weapons and armour returned by the gangrels. Later the whole family came down for a last visit. Sisters, nieces, aunts wept and clasped each other. Children mooned around looking woeful or puzzled until grannies helped them choose an instrument, ornament or video to remind them of a favourite brother or uncle. The living left and the vault was sealed. Clear liquid welled from the floor until it covered everything inside. The liquid turned black and frothy like Irish stout, sank back through the floor into the roots of
the powerplant and left the vault perfectly empty and clean.

On the day after the funeral a morning service was held in the stalk room of Dryhope house. Smooth, milk-white and six feet wide the stalk grew like a tree from the floor and out through the ceiling. All who remained of the family were gathered round it except three members of the Boys' Brigade: these were at the Warrior house watching replays of the recent war with other junior cadets. In a few days they would return with solemn faces and expectations of being more thoroughly served by women, but now their sisters, aunts and grannies sprawled, reclined or squatted about the floor on rugs and large cushions. The four greatest great-grandmothers were enthroned in chairs. The only two adult males also had raised seats. Joe, smoking a good cigar, lay in a wheelchair with attachments supporting the stumps of an arm and leg. Wat, lightly bandaged, sprawled on a chaise longue.

A stately woman of fifty was mother that day and stood at a crystalline table, the top patterned with coloured points of light which flowed from her finger-tips and continually changed as she played a
Sanctus
which had
preceded the miracle of transubstantiation for centuries before. The
Sanctus
ended and two sturdy girls of twelve stood facing her, one on each side of the stalk. Silencing the organ she attended to the orders of the day. Nurses asked for flasks of cell serum and protein to help the growth of Joe's new arm and leg, an ointment to ease Granny Tibs's rheumatic knee, and Elastoplast for the medical chest. The mother struck the organ. With a low humming the objects appeared as diagrams on the stalk, each inside a circle. There were clicks, twangs and gurgles as the outlines received colour and tone. With sharp detonations the images became solid things in round cavities. The acolytes lifted them out and gave them to the nurses. With heavy thuds the cavities became grey blotches which faded from the stalk leaving it an unblemished, delicate shade of palest pink. The mother had made the sound sequence easier on the ear by blending it with chords from the
Agnus Dei
by Carver, Palestrina, Bach and Berlioz, covering the last thuds with a loud Amen which faded with the blotches fading from the stalk.

Then the teachers ordered disks, paper, pencils, paint; the cooks milk, cheese, flour, sugar, coffee beans; the henwife ordered a sack
of meal, a sack of corn, a first edition of Lindsay's
Voyage to Arcturus
; the joiner ordered parts for a new orthopaedic bed she was making for Joe; weavers and embroiderers asked for many different colours of yarn and silk. When all were delivered the stalk was flushed rose red, a throbbing was heard from the underground roots and the room was colder, sure signs of plant exhaustion.

“A light order now,” said the mother. “Granny Tibs?”

Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty and ordered a doll for her two-year-old great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. It had to be exactly like a doll she remembered playing with herself at that age, a china girl doll with curly yellow hair, blue eyes, a matching silk dress with a big bow at the back. When the diagram appeared she remembered that the hair had not been curly but smooth, and twisted in two long plaits tied with bows at the ends. The dress had also been of a historical kind called
dirndl
worn by the women of Bolivia or California — that should be a clue — the dress was illustrated in a book called
Heidi Grows Up
which had been published she thought in the eighteenth or perhaps nineteenth century. The doll was also made of cloth, not china at all. It took a long time to get exactly the doll Granny Tibs
remembered and by then the colour of the stalk and temperature of the room were normal again. The children now spoke out. A young jeweller wanted two hundred grammes of silver wire and was persuaded to accept a hundred of copper. A young sculptor who asked for six kilogrammes of clay was told to collect it from Mountbenger where some aunts had a pottery; she said she hated Mountbenger because of a boy there, so was given a four-page geological guide to help her find her own supply of clay. A very young wood-worker wanted a sharp new chisel but the joiner said she would show him how to sharpen his old one. This answer caused outcries which the mother drowned with a blast of cheery sound.

Finally she faced the men and said, “Cigars, Joe?”

“I've all I need, Auntie,” he answered, blowing a smoke ring. She said, “Wat, you have a wanting look.”

“Have I? Then give me something that stops memories.”

“You can have Paxil, Zoloft, or Prozac, Gilbey's London gin, The Macallan, Courvoisier or a thousand other derivatives of alcohol, opium and cocaine.”

“I want nothing that changes my chemistry,”
he said coldly, “Give me a history book — not a statistical one — a book that reads like somebody talking.”

“What period?”

“A period of excitement when folk thought they were making a better world.”

Only the mother looked straight at Wat but a new alertness in the room seemed shared by everyone except the boys, the oldest great-granny, Kittock the henwife and, apparently, Joe.

“There were many such times,” said the mother. She pressed the organ and a table of names and dates flowed onto the stalk.

“The foundation of Israel, A.D. or B.C.?” she suggested, “The rise of Islam? Children's Crusade? Peasants' Revolt? French Revolution? More books have been written about each than there are brands of alcohol.”

There was a silence in which Wat reddened with embarrassment. Everyone seemed to be watching him. A calm, monotonous yet oddly sing-song voice said, “Have you read
Ten Days
That Shook the World
, Wat?”

Kittock the henwife had spoken without lifting her eyes from the novel on her lap.

“Never,” said Wat thankfully.

“Well, that's the book for you.”

So Wat ordered
Ten Days That Shook the
World
, Reed's account of Muscovite politics in 1917. The plant substantiated it. A girl gave it to him.

“Come outside, Wat” said Joe setting his chair in motion, “I need to see some hills.”

Wat started following but paused when the mother said, “Wat, you have lost a father, brothers, friends. We have lost brothers, lovers and sons in a war we never wanted.”

“I pity you of course,” said Wat, shrugging,

“But a circus will be here in a few days. Men will be coming from all over Scotland and even farther. Make the most of them.”

He strode out.

On this sunny spring day the projecting eaves of Dryhope house neatly shadowed the surrounding veranda. Joe sat here watching the view with the intense frown of a starving man who cannot quite believe in the meal before him. From under the veranda a flow of pure water fed a series of pools linked by waterfalls. The nearest held trout and cresses and a marble bird table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier. The second was a play-pool
where infants splashed and shouted in sight of two ten-year-old aunts who lay gossiping on a nearby lawn. The third was a fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house. The last was a duckpond from which Dryhope burn flowed down through a glen planted with fruit trees and berry bushes. On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife. A steepening of the hillside hid land immediately beyond but not Saint Mary's Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan, reflected also three houses by the shore. Oxcleuch, Cappercleuch and Bowerhope resembled Dryhope: large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet. The summits appeared at cloud level, each a disc of bright vapour from which a line of vapour flowed east with the wind. More than fifty such discs patterned the sky. The remotest over powerplants in Moffat, Eskdale and Teviot, looked like tiny flecks in the wedges of blue air between the hills. Lines of vapour from these and many more in the west ruled the heavenly blue into parallel strips. The lines were more emphatic today, as always after big funerals.

Joe pointed to the view with his only foot and said wistfully, “There's a lot of goodness out there.”

“But ye cannae feel it,” said Wat, who sat cross-egged and reading on a rug beside him.

“No yet.”

“Maybe you'll never feel part of that goodness again. I lost the feeling with my first battle.”

“Pessimist. I'm no like you. I'll feel as good as ever when I get back my arm and leg.”

Joe glanced wistfully down at the crystalline cylinders extending from his right shoulder and right thigh. Tiny atomic motors among the pinkish-brown broth inside were nudging together cells of new limbs, but a month would pass before outlines of bones appeared. Joe sighed then said, “You made them very tense in there. You should keep ill-sounding words for me or the Warrior house.”

“Dryhope women are stupid,” said Wat coldly,

“They think I'm mourning the Dad — that daft old prick.”

“It should be possible for you to mourn the Dad,” said Joe gently, “
I'm
mourning him and he loved you most, loved you more than anyone because you're our bonniest fighter and always argle-bargled with him. He liked contention. Are you mourning the bairns?”

“Rage not sorrow is my disease. Why did our
fucking old progenitor con nearly all Ettrick into dying round a pole with a tin chicken on top? Why did he want us to fight after the decent chiefs of Teviot and Eskdale, Liddesdale and Galawater had surrendered? I'll tell you why. He was past his prime and knew he was fighting his last war. He wanted to take our whole army into the roots with him. Our bairns were slaughtered because our Dad feared age and loneliness.”

“He made sure we'll be remembered! The lot of us! Living and dead!” said Joe with a small firm smile, “The bairns too, in fact the bairns most of all. ‘All my fledglings have turned into eagles,' he said. O he was right. Wee lads of fourteen have never chosen to die like that before — not since the dawn of television. If history wasnae a thing of the past I would say Ettrick
made it
two days ago. The strategy was the Dad's but only you had the spunk to get the standard to the cliff top and kill the man you passed it to … What's wrong?”

“I'm remembering his face,” muttered Wat after a moment. He had dropped his book and was biting his nails. Joe said softly, “A cigar?” and offered one.

“No.”

After a minute of silence Joe said mildly,
“You're wrong about Dad wanting us all to go out with him. He saved me by falling on me when Dodds's butchers were hacking us both, that was no accident. But nothing you say upsets me, Wat — you arenae normal. You're a hero. I'm proud of what you did. And I don't care if all this …” (he waved his only hand at the view) “… never seems sweet to me again. Pride will keep me going, like it keeps you.”

He looked down at Wat who was reading again, or pretending to. Joe said, “How can a soldier who thinks our last war too bloody forget it by reading about dark ages when men fought wars without rules, and burned bombed looted peaceful houses, and killed raped enslaved whole families of women children and old ones — and boasted about it in their filthy newspapers! I hated history when I was wee. When Granny Pringle showed us films from those days I had nightmares.”